"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

"It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."--Bryan Stevenson

Monday, April 09, 2018

Never think my thoughts....

To [Sam] Harris, and you’ll hear this explicitly, identity politics is something others do. To me, it’s something we all do, and that he and many others refuse to admit they’re doing. This is one of the advantages of being the majority group: Your concerns get coded as concerns; it’s everyone else who is playing identity politics.

The trap, and we all fall into it sooner or later, is that this reasoning applies to his argument as well:

Harris’s view is that the criticism he and Murray have received is a moral panic driven by identity politics and political correctness. My view is that contemporary IQ results are inseparable from both the past and present of racism in America, and to conduct this conversation without voices who are expert on that subject, and who hail from the affected communities, is to miss the point from the outset.

But "IQ" is defined by people who get to determine what "reasoning" is, how it is measured, and most importantly, that they have an abundance of whatever it is they are measuring. The "affected communities" are those they deem, by their reasoning and argument, to be inferior, to be lacking in this idea they are measuring as if it had weight, mass, or otherwise occupied space. Having declared themselves in possession of this thing, they then decide, based entirely on their expertise, that other people lack it, and can be arranged accordingly on a scale. They may eschew any judgment arising as a consequence of applying this scale to individuals, but they are always sure to be in the position of judgment, not of being judged. In that very sense this is a conversation without voices of those "who hail from the affected communities," because to argue "IQ" is an invalid measure, or shouldn't matter, is already to identify yourself as falling outside the acceptable measure, and therefore to be making the argument because you didn't win the "IQ" lottery. "Contemporary IQ results" (is there another kind? Do we know how Klein is using the modifier "contemporary" there?) are not just inseparable from racism in America, they are inseparable from any system that seeks to establish a hierarchy (which is what racism does) of humans, individually and collectively.

And the central problem here is not using "IQ" as a measure without taking account of racism; it's using any measure to establish a superior and inferior class you can assign members into.